Patrick Hennessey

by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars

  problem is we’ve handed the ammo and body armour back in again now and got the personal effects back and they seem to belong to a world so far away from the dust and destruction of PB Inkerman or the pure ’Nam chaos of the thick green zone that they’re all barely recognizable and i guess this is why winning the peace is harder than winning the war. the incoming teams taking over from us, pale and well-fed and boggle-eyed with apprehension and anticipation, ask a series of questions almost impossible to answer beyond a snort of disconcerting laughter.

  ‘have we made any progress?’—you know what, probably not but it doesn’t fucking matter because at least we’re going home.

  my afghan commander sees me off with a final ramadan feast and bear hug which has me choking back emotion because he’s a good lad and we’ve fought side by side for 6 months and i feel like a tourist who’s had his fill and is going back home and i assume he is just talking about the british army in general or the regiment when he looks at me and smiles that we’ll be back in afghanistan fighting again soon. i assure him that i’ll be tucked up safely back in london enjoying the nightmares in a comfy bed with cotton sheets and killing the memory cells with grossly over-priced booze from wanky gastro-pubs and he shakes his head and scares the fuck out of me by pointing straight at me and practically quoting dorothy parker as he reels off some old Pansher Valley wisdom—they sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

  maybe, but for now i’m soaked wet through and sick to the pit of my stomach with the sound of thunder and the flash of lightning so the storm will have to do without Toran Padi for a while

  i’m going home.

  6

  Decompression

  The statistic that floats around, probably dubious but with its own momentum, is that more Falklands War veterans have killed themselves in the twenty-five years since the conflict than died in the fighting. We’d always been taught that the figures were much worse among the troops who had flown straight home, rolled victoriously from the airport and then back into happy but unknowing homes and communities, than they were among the Marines and sailors who’d seen and done similarly horrible things but who had started to process it all on the ship on the way back.

  How all that added up to thirty-six hours on the lash in Cyprus we weren’t really sure, but neither did we care in the amazing holiday atmosphere on Tunnel Beach, everyone as skinny as they’d ever be, shrunken cheeks exaggerated by enormous mops of hair that no one had the heart to start bothering people about yet. Given how drunken the following months were perhaps it was all for the best that the first massive night of freedom and booze was self-contained, the boys all running around naked by midnight trailing ‘flaming arseholes’ and already squaring up over whose war stories were best and passing out in hedges. It took the pressure off when the coach finally pulled up back into Lille Barracks and families were reunited under the Aldershot drizzle with cringy media lurking in the background, so the best thing was to race off down the M3 as if the last seven months had never happened because the cars and the traffic and the tunes and the beds at home were all exactly the same.

  Except that the last seven months had happened, and in quiet moments at exuberant dinner parties and the endless debauch that ensued we’d know that we were the only people round the table who’d seen and done what we’d seen and done. Tea and toast became scotch and toast as the frustrated lads got out of hospital and bedlam reigned in the mess.

  No one wanted or chose to be a scotch-drinking, night-spoiling, glass-smashing, relationship-bashing cliché, it was just as unavoidable as slamming on the brakes in a car on ice and watching the wall come sliding towards you anyway.

  And of course then no one really knows what to say, friends slightly stunned by your proud video montage and old teachers and godparents who sat down with their Monday-evening soup and glass of wine and watched the little boys they used to know swear and kill their way across the screens. How could we tell them that what we felt most about being home was jealous of 52 Brigade who were out there in our bases, with our Afghans, shooting our enemy? How could you rationalize the moments when you’d break into a cold sweat at the traffic lights, clench your teeth, caught between tears and laughter and not a clue why? How could you explain to the well-meaning, well-intentioned, sensitively phrased questions that you’d loved it, that everything was flat and that you were sad that there were no more e-mails to send?

  You couldn’t. So we drank, and mess nights and Friday nights and weeks of leave blurred into one long inevitable repeated violent pattern, where Evans and Finch had to take it in turns to lash with you for safety, and you found yourself staring down the wrong sort of men on the wrong sort of streets just because deep down you wanted a fight. Wanted to slam someone into the wall of a club and be able to say with utter calm and terrifying confidence in your eyes that he had picked the wrong fight because you were a fucking killer. The first night the Micks got back from Iraq, bitter at their overshadowed tour and mouthing off ill-advisedly on the streets of Aldershot, how could you not feel a surge of pride at the boys who’d stood up and the ruckus that had ensued and the bleating of the Hampshire Constabulary who had used up all their CS gas in one night of glorious fist-whirling mayhem.

  The CSM beat the crap out of his dishwasher, which wouldn’t work. Everyone had stories of irrational anger, frightened kids and confused wives. London was a land of parking tickets and light bulbs which needed changing. We were fucking supermen, übermensch who’d chewed up and spat out the massive Taliban summer offensive and had had it beamed into ten p.m. BBC1 living rooms for good measure. We were the point of the spear against which the forces of mad medieval darkness had hurled themselves in the open-invitation playground scrap, Infidels XI vs. Extremism All-Stars, which was taking place behind the bike sheds of the world, the fight for what we thought was civilization and the right for our future daughters to learn and wear what they wanted, and we hadn’t budged an inch, and now we found ourselves back home and unadored and owing the fucking congestion charge.

  When ‘our’ Panorama aired we all trooped down to London to watch a screening, awkward in suits and already filling out again, watching ourselves in loosely hanging combats. We were so far from it then it might as well have been years, not weeks, previously, but it only felt like days. The SWAGs had been invited—soldiers’ wives and girlfriends sceptical at having to relive their own tour nightmares and see how close their husbands came but not going to pass up the BBC’s free booze. In those last minutes as we settled down to watch I slipped my hand out of Jen’s and couldn’t explain to her, beautiful and confused as I abandoned her in the back row with Viva and the rest, that I could only do this sat next to the boys, watch it side by side with the guys who’d fought it side by side. LSgt Fear’s wife stifled sobs as she watched her husband’s thumb get shot off—I hated the distance it put between us all, but couldn’t explain or fight it.

  The CSM with reflective poetry in his soul had carved into the wall of the Sangin District Centre the legend ‘for those who have fought for it, life will always have a flavour the sheltered cannot taste’, which was about the truest thing in the whole town.

  Of course we went off the rails.

  Even now I still count time back from Afghanistan. Each morning brings an unavoidable mental calculation and the image of what was being done exactly a year ago. Without pretension or guile I’d catch myself months after we got back referring to having come home just weeks ago. If realizing it had been a year since we’d gone out, or a year since the first contact, had been hard, I can only imagine what it’s going to feel like when it’s been a year since we got back. We bounced hard from the reentry and, with nothing better to do, we carried on drinking.

  If we’d thought that we’d get closure with the medals, we were sorely disappointed. We knew that Churchill had said, ‘Every medal casts a shadow’ (it was a pretty safe bet, Churchill had said everything). We didn’t know it was an understatement.

  No one j
oined the Army to win medals; they were extra glitter that even through Sandhurst you were only vaguely aware of and imagined would probably require extra polishing. But part of giving-in to the culture was giving-in to the mythology of gallantry—learning the improbable citation narratives of regimental history and Telegraph obituaries. The first step had been aching for campaign medals, plotting thirty-one-day mini-breaks to Kosovo or Northern Ireland to add a line to your mess kit chest CV, gazing enviously at the LEs who’d been out on light-blue UN tours of Cyprus and the strange rainbow ribbon of Op Granby and knowing they were medals you could never wear.

  But once we’d been out on a real tour, a war-fighting tour with its own rosette and people performing heroics every day, suddenly we wanted more. Lying under the mosi-net, swinging in a hammock or waiting after stag for the fatigue to kick in and sleep to close as the evenings got fresh enough to wrap yourself up in a liner, we’d turned over the thoughts of who had done what on our tour, who deserved what and why. The commanders read the rules, the stark mathematical calculations involved (the higher the assessed percentage likelihood of death as a result of the action, the higher the distinction) and diligently wrote up the guys we thought deserving, all the while who could help turning a few slack thoughts over in their own heads.

  In those dangerous flights of night-time fancy, peppered by the distant rattle of an incident further down the Sangin Valley (well, there was no further up from us at that stage) it wasn’t those close to me I imagined impressing. Family and friends, they already knew, would understand, would have read between the lines of blueys and Facebook profiles and see in a distant shimmer in the eyes that something important had happened in the last few months. They were in the bag.

  It was the thought of cocks you had met along the way being secretly disappointed on the loo as they read Soldier magazine, the thought of the good guys being quietly proud, of being able to drive down to Sandhurst and find out CSMs White and Coates and owe it to them. It was childish and indulgent, but it was fun.

  Back at home, it was more serious.

  It was about legitimacy.

  It was about the sense that official recognition would somehow rehabilitate us, would end the awkward silence that descended in the room when anything about the Army came on the news, parents of friends glancing involuntarily over at you and wondering. Would end the tedious self-justification, the coded references to missions and incidents which varied depending on the audience: sanitized understatement for uncomprehending civilians, gratuitous overstatement for the war-hungry lads, apologetic middle ground for comrades in other units who hadn’t quite shared the glory and somewhere elusive in the middle the relaxing truth which could only be shared with those who knew because they had been standing right there next to you.

  The back-slaps of those who’d seen you on TV and the patient, obligated understanding of close friends and family was one thing; we wanted documents signed in black and white and glinting metal forged with our names to shout to the rafters that what we had done was not wrong, not bad, but glorious and heroic, and we weren’t sick to feel that it had all been such fucking good fun.

  But when the papers trumped the largest haul of medals for generations, the bulging Honours and Awards List a groaning litany of gallantry, what stood out were the names that weren’t on it. Sat around the luxurious tables for Ladies Dinner night in the mess, dazzled by the play of candlelight on the triple-ranked array of ornamental silver which occupied every spare inch of the table, what should have been a celebration was forced jollity and strained stoicism which ebbed as the bitter, champagne-filled horns came out, and we raised endless toasts to Harold Macmillan, who in the First World War was famous across the Grenadiers for his singular bravery and, though thrice wounded, never received a single honor, and we got more and more drunk and more and more angry.

  We understood that it was all relative. That down in Helmand people were getting thanked for the sort of stuff they were getting written up for in Iraq, and in Iraq getting a quiet nod for the sort of stuff that would have been headline news in the eighties, in the good old days when company commanders got MBEs for bringing all their boys home across the Irish Sea and that was that.

  Rampaging through the mess that night in a sullen orgy of destruction, feeling sorry for Martin and Seadog, who’d at least got something though still less than they deserved, we wanted justice and revenge, wanted the bastard brigadier or the idiot committee or anyone to blame. But the commanding officer just looked sad, like a captain whose ship had hit an iceberg in tropical waters. It turned out later that the Afghans had named a mosque after him, which certainly kicked the DSOs and OBEs into touch, but it didn’t make it any easier to face the guys the next morning—banging hangover regardless, I had to force myself to look up and down the line at roll call, watch guys manfully pretending to be proud hearing they’d been awarded certificates when they should have got medals and wonder where I’d let them down.

  There was a lovely anecdote about a commanding officer who was awarded a DSO—I think for something in Africa but the story changes—and got the entire battalion into the gym to explain to them that he was humbled by the medal which he didn’t consider to be ‘his award’ but ‘the whole battalion’s award’. Later that week one of his lance-corporals presented himself at the door to his office to explain that he had a wedding at the weekend and was wondering if he could sign-out the ‘battalion’s medal’. He was, of course, told to piss off. We tried to laugh it off, but it stung.

  It stung because there was no closure. Out on Salisbury Plain, back in green with muddy boots and blank ammunition, we trained the Royal Irish for their forthcoming deployment, and all we wanted was to go back out with them, as if we had unfinished business.

  Sometimes the system really does know better. There was no way in our state of mind the commanding officer was going to let us charge back out into the desert. With either exceptional emotional intelligence or a desire to get us out of his hair he sent me and Slothy—his two gobbiest and potentially troublesome captains—off to train the US Marine Corps, figuring the two young officers with the greatest delusions of war grandeur would perhaps be cured by a stint with the jarheads. I guess in a way we were.

  Out in 29 Palms, the sprawling Marine Corps base in the middle of the Mojave Desert, while we marvelled at the training and the resources and the expertise and cohesion of the Yanks and wondered what the hell we could teach them, I sunbathed and thought about where we’d all gone. Marlow back out to Afghanistan soon, this time with the Paras, which suited him fine, but still hurting for the boys he’d lost, charging up the escalator with a certainty I could only envy. Marlow knew what was at the top for him; I felt myself getting higher and higher and still didn’t. Slothy knew what was at the top as well. He’d be a general one day and a good one, but that meant the time had come to hang up his fighting boots and start some desk-fighting—his hardest battle by far.

  The rest of the boys? Harrison, out, surfing Biarritz and growing hair with enough Mummy credit in the bank for decades. Fergus in his element in well-cut suits in London, lunching furiously in Whites with the old boys to pull in millions of pounds for the charity we’d set up for the injured guardsmen—a civvie in all but name. Mark, out. Tobin, out. The old guard, Sidney, Gabriel, Seb, long gone. In their place when we got back there’d be new young thrusters like Holcroft to take up the reins. The Amber 63 boys were going the same way. CSgt Yates and Sgt T had both picked up well-deserved promotions but were back with their own units, serving out their last few years and wondering what the hell the real world could offer them. Even the bright prospects had put their papers in; LCpl Price, Lloydy, Mizon in and out of trouble. They’d joined for excitement, they’d had it and now they wanted to try and find a normal life, whatever that was. Only Kuks and Will were heading back, they really did have unfinished business, and probably Sgt Gillies would still be puffing alongside. Next time they would be the grizzly medalled veterans, taking the
crows under their wings and hopefully doing a better job than I did.

  And yes, it was good to know that you were part of something bigger, something more important than yourself which had been before you’d joined it and would carry on without noticing you’d left, a reassuring anonymity in this wonderful beast of thousands of ordinary men doing extraordinary things every single day. There was something comforting in the inevitability of it all, the certainty that, if we hung around long enough, we’d become the outdated ones tutting at the flagrant disrespect of the junior officers and boring them with stories about this one time, on the dam in Helmand …

  Goodbye to All That